Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. It was intense!” skip past newsletter promotion “I’d never met Miles before and I thought he wanted us to play separately, but he made us play together. “I went to the studio and there’s three keyboards, with Herbie Hancock sitting by one,” Smith says. With his credits building in the early 70s, he got the call from Miles Davis. After picking up the piano and tuba in high school, Smith was indoctrinated into jazz via the saxophonist Charlie Parker and began gigging in New York. Smith grew up in a musical household in Richmond – his father was a member of gospel group the Harmonizing Four and the soul singer Sam Cooke and pioneering guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe were among their musical guests. Pharoah said we had to record it.” The resulting composition, Astral Traveling, is one of Smith and Sanders’ most well-known, combining the wafting vibrato of the Rhodes with Sanders’ keening soprano saxophone. He told me it was an electric piano and I started playing around on it until this beautiful sound came out. “I spotted this keyboard and asked the engineer what it was. “I walked into the studio and everyone was busy setting up, but since I played the grand piano, I had nothing to do,” he says. It is an experience that harks back to when Smith first encountered the Rhodes piano while working on Sanders’ 1971 record Thembi. It was like stepping back in time – as soon as I saw the Rhodes, I started playing.” “The right opportunity hadn’t come up for me to make another record these past years until Adrian and Ali called and flew me out to their studio in California. “They enticed me back to the studio,” Smith says. Featuring nine tracks, JID017 marks Smith’s return to the electric Fender Rhodes piano that shaped his 70s sound, and was conceived in collaboration with the label’s co-founders and producers, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Twenty-five years after the release of his last album, the synth-driven Transformation, Smith is back with a record of original compositions on the label Jazz Is Dead. Now 82 and speaking from his home in Richmond, Virginia, Smith is as laid-back in person as his sound suggests. It was like stepping back in time – as soon as I saw the Rhodes, I started playing The database WhoSampled estimates that his work has been used in 395 tracks.

Smith’s records have been sampled heavily by Jay-Z, Stetsasonic and Mary J Blige, while Smith himself collaborated on rapper Guru’s 1993 cult jazz-rap record, Jazzmatazz, Vol 1. His music has continued to cross genre boundaries in the decades since.

The sound and the fury first edition